The Impossibility of Death...

I was just watching a video about the development of sculpture on smarthistory.org, and while displaying an image of Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, the narrators questioned its meaning and whether or not it really could be considered a sculpture. Here are my thoughts…

Damian Hirst, The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Some one Living, 1991

 First of all in, my mind, it is a sculpture and in that case a work of art. If you look back to someone like Duchamp and his Fountain (which I talked about in my previous post) you can see the early beginnings of artists pushing the idea of what can be considered a sculptural work, or art for that matter. Robert Rauschenberg also did this. He, like Duchamp, took “found objects” and incorporated them into a larger work. What’s key with Rauschenberg, is the ability for his works to stir emotion. Looking at an image of one of his works you may not feel it, but I promise you if you have a chance to come face to face with one in a gallery you will feel something (even if it is a bad something). Yes some may look at a Robert Rauschenberg and see a pile of junk pulled out of the backyard or an old dusty barn, but as for me, I see an autobiography and someone searching to express a memory or an emotion in ways that words, or even paint and canvas, often can’t.

Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, 1954  

        Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955-59

Perhaps, though, I am bias. I have very little artistic capability, which I blame myself for entirely. I was given all the means to be a pretty decent artist. My mother put me in art classes at a very young age and I did well enough. Then I took more classes in college and did a whole two years of sketching and drafting in design school. But in the end I did not push myself. I lacked the discipline and was lazy when it came to developing skills in the areas of painting and sketching. Well, sadly, I still needed a way to express myself. Since my lack of practice had made the brush and pencil obsolete I had to find a new medium with which to express myself. The medium, naturally for me, was collage. I could find images, textures, and colors from the world of printed pictures and words and reaappropriated them to facilitate my own meanings.

Now I’m not saying artists like Rauschenberg or Hirst are not (unlike myself) talented; on the contrary. I think that in these forms they found a process of communicating ideas and emotions in a way a two dimensional painting or print could not, and also in a way that a bronze or plastic sculpture could not. Hirst, in particular, needed an object that would cause the profound horror of sudden death to scream its way in to the minds of his viewers. I don’t think he could have done this with some gelatin mold of a shark. It needed to be real, threatening, and also morbid in its process of decay.  The Physical Impossibility… speaks of two fears in the human mind. The idea that death is often sudden, painful and horrific, and also that every one of us, though we are absolutely alive and vigorously so, will one day decay into the nothingness of the grave. This brings me to another question. What dose Hirst’s work say in light of the twenty first century mindset and why choose a decaying shark to say it?  Well…here come my thoughts again.

Contemporary time has afforded us a lot of comfort and, along with that, security. In earlier times, depending on who you were, the goal was to stay alive and to find yet again another way of making it through the next month, week, or even day. The futility of life was constantly knocking on your door like the embodiment of death pictured works from the time of the Black Death. But today things have changed. It’s as if we have caged death, chained him up and locked him in a closet in the back of some sterile hospital room that we can look into for a moment if we have to, if someone we love has been so unlucky to find him. But then we let the glass doors of the ER slide close behind us and go out into a world of central heated homes and bustling grocery stores that provide us our food and shelter and we forget. We tell ourselves death won’t find us here, not in this safe modern world. But deep down each of us knows that death cannot be caged, even by the arms of modern medicine. No, he is lurking somewhere beneath the surface, and when the time is right he’ll strike and remind us that even we, a modern society, could not escape him.

Pieter Bruegel, The Triumph of Death, 1562

Hirst tells us this through the jaws of a shark. He transcends the security of modern times and takes us back to the days of fight or flight. He makes us the toothsome prey and death the stealthy unblinking predator. We may be masters in our contemporary metropolises, but in the wilderness of the world, in the depths of a wild ocean we are no stronger, no more adapted then our prehistoric predecessors. We too can fall victim to such savage ends at the hands (or mouth) of a creature, that like death, has shared this world with us since the beginning. We tell ourselves its impossible, that that primal fear, that awful unforeseen death cannot find us here in a well lit museum filled with the calls of children and excited patrons. But as we look back into those empty eyes and try to push another shiver away, we find a feeling that tells us that the impossible is possible, that we have surly looked into the eyes of death. Here is Hirst’s genius, his goal.
K.